I have played with the idea of Astronomy as a hobby for years… but for those who live in areas of large population about the only real astronomy you can delve into comes from the internet of from astronomy magazines… You see, there is so much light coming from all forms of outdoor illumination (parking lots, ball fields, airports, city centers, etc.) that merely looking up presents only some illuminated haze…
A related point to this is something which I have always wondered about…with the huge popularity of science fiction movies (alien invasions, et.al.), the fact that the majority of the movie viewing public probably never takes the time to look at the sky… and with light pollution, there is little to see anyways. Is this yet another chicken-egg dichotomy?
Over the last several millennia we have crafted a number of new forms of entertainment, from theater, to opera, to movies, TV, the internet, and so on…just to take the place of looking at the stars. And while this backdrop is becoming rarer these days, it still provides the best accompaniment to our thoughts.
Starry Night
http://places.designobserver.com/feature/starry-night/27728
According to the calendar, it’s spring on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. But tell that to the biting 45-degree wind that sweeps across the Colorado Plateau and slams broadside into my parked car. It’s cold and dark and an hour past my bedtime. I’m tempted to pull my down jacket up around my ears and sink deeper behind the steering wheel. But my companions, Teresa Jiles and Dan Duriscoe, waste little time getting started. They no sooner kill the headlights on their camper than they start rummaging through their gear, pulling on long johns and rustling camera and computer-monitoring equipment. Neither one complains. For Jiles and Duriscoe, pain goes with the gain of holding research positions on the elite Night Sky Team, a program of the National Park Service. The duo has endured freezing winds, lonely nights on remote mountaintops, tire-shredding roads and even the occasional stalking by curious mountain lions. For these astronomy buffs, which fell in love with the night sky at an early age and never lost their childhood fascination with globular clusters and galactic nebulas, this is a dream job come true.
As I step out of my car into the starry night, I understand why. Grand Canyon is among the few parks in the lower 48 whose nighttime skies are virtually untouched by artificial light pollution. Here, some 5,500 stars are visible to the naked eye; the profound darkness lends uncommon clarity and brilliance to the heavens. Against the boot-blackened field of outer space, solitary stars glint like polished diamonds on a jeweler’s velvet. Even tiny, faint stars cast a glow, some of them massing to form recognizable patterns such as the great highway of celestial light known as the Milky Way. Glimpsed on a cloudless night, it’s easy to see why the northern tribe of Ojibwa Indians regarded the Milky Way as the road to the afterlife — its path appears thronged with shimmering souls.
Light Pollution: Night Skies, Dark No More
http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2008/03/14/turning-out-the-lights
The night is not what it was. Once, the Earth was cast perpetually half in shadow. Man and beast slept beneath inky skies, dotted with glittering stars. Then came fire, the candle, and the light bulb, gradually drawing back the curtain of darkness and giving us unprecedented control over our lives.
But a brighter world, it is becoming increasingly clear, has its drawbacks. A study released last month finding that breast cancer is nearly twice as common in brightly lit communities as in dark ones only added to a growing body of evidence that artificial light threatens not just stargazing but also public health, wildlife, and possibly even safety.
Those findings are all the more troubling considering that an estimated 30 percent of outdoor lighting—plus even some indoor lighting—is wasted. Ill-conceived, ineffective, and inefficient lighting costs the nation about $10.4 billion a year, according to Bob Gent of the International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit that aims to curtail light pollution, and it generates 38 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.
Motivated by such trends, more than two dozen cities worldwide will go dim on March 29 in an hour-long demonstration. At 8 p.m. local time, Atlanta’s and Chicago’s tallest towers, the Phoenix Suns’ arena, and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge will join many other sites in turning off their lights. According to the World Wildlife Fund, which is organizing the event, an estimated 2.2 million Australians switched off their lights or took other action during “Earth Hour” last year in Sydney, briefly reducing that city’s energy use by more than 10 percent.
A number of groups are trying to measure light pollution and assess its detrimental effects on the environment in the hope that people will reduce their own contribution to the problem. Last week, as part of an annual program called GLOBE at Night, thousands of students and amateur scientists stared up at the constellation Orion from locations across the country and reported how many of its stars they could see. No data are yet available, but in dark, rural areas, says Gent, about 2,000 stars are typically visible at night, compared with “maybe five” in a bright city square—and about 5,000 in centuries past. “One of the goals,” says Steve Pompea of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Ariz., “is to identify urban oases—places in our cities that are dark enough to see the sky.”
People who are working while others are stargazing may face the greatest risks. Hormonal disturbances triggered by nighttime exposure to white or bluish light can disrupt circadian rhythms and fuel the growth of tumors, experiments show. Two decades of research indicate that women who work night shifts have unusually high rates of breast cancer, and some data suggest a parallel effect on male workers’ prostate cancer rates. Last December, a unit of the World Health Organization deemed shift work a probable human carcinogen.
Yet light and cancer may be even more fundamentally linked. In last month’s study, a team that included Richard Stevens, the University of Connecticut Health Center epidemiologist who first proposed the connection, compared satellite images of Israel at night with maps showing where cancers are most common. Its analysis suggests that 73 percent more breast cancers occur in the country’s brightest communities than in its darkest.
What Is Light Pollution?
http://www.starrynightlights.com/lpIndex.html
In a nutshell, Light Pollution is misdirected or misused light… generally resulting from an inappropriate application of exterior lighting products. Light Pollution comes in several flavors… each with its own negative effects.
